unstuck digital» Link Building

Is Your Link Building Strategy Scalable?

Mike Tekula — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:00:42 +0000

SEO is mainly about links – the more you get from valuable pages, the better you rank. Period.

Sure, the on-page stuff matters, but links can outweigh any of it.

That’s why Acrobat Reader ranks #1 for “click here” – because of the links pointing to that page. You won’t find the words “click here” anywhere in the page copy or code.

I’ve been involved in my fair share of failed link building campaigns. I wish I could say that over the years I’ve developed the perfect system to build links that help you rank.

The truth is that there isn’t a “right way” to do it.

When every project is unique it’s difficult to put together a system that works reliably. You build principles, tricks and resources – but automation is a long way off. And, in fact, as soon as someone develops an automated way to build value of any kind the value evaporates.

But if there’s one principal that all of the best examples of link building hammers home, it’s this: the best link building campaigns are scalable.

So how to you make your link building strategy scalable?

The stairs are for suckers

Many traditional link building campaigns involve a series of repeatable steps:

Research link partners
Compile a list of target partners
Contact them
Check up on links
Repeat
Wonder what happened to your life

I’m not saying there is zero value in this approach.

Some of our clients have existing relationships with powerful organizations - with powerful websites. In these cases it makes sense to put a little time and resources into securing a link (one way or reciprocal) between the web properties. It depends on the link, but there can be real value here.

However, you’ll almost always find yourself in a position where you’ve exhausted the low-hanging fruit. You hit the point of diminishing returns, and asking for links one at a time no longer makes sense.

So what do you do?

Develop a resource worth sharing

KAYAK developed KAYAK trends to offer data trending information on the travel industry. And, no, they’re not charging users for the data (even though it’s safe to say they’ve invested quite a bit in resources to get this up and running).

Thing is, people will link to this resource. It’s interesting and useful – nobody else has something quite like it. And because it exists in a subfolder of KAYAK.com the entire website will benefit from those links.

Fair enough, but we aren’t KAYAK, right? Most of us are operating with limited budgets.

The best resources aren’t always the most expensive to create. Be crafty. Information is out there. Organize it. Present it in new ways, with new angles. Find a need in your market and fill it.

Entertain and infect

Matt Inman is a master of creating viral content. He’s proven this time and again.

His latest work often has no utility beyond being hilarious. “5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth” is one of my favorites. This stuff just works – it’s funny, well-illustrated and altogether sharable.

If you hit on the right note and create something that makes people spit out their coffee, they’re going to share it. They can’t help themselves. And if that person is a blogger or otherwise publishes online content, that usually means you’ll get a link.

It’s tough to predict viral content. Sometimes you miss. It’s part of the game. But when you hit, you can hit big.

Distribute goodies

A popular example of this strategy is building a blog theme (a WordPress theme for example) with a link to your website in the footer.

This strategy is somewhat questionable – search engines may consider it manipulative if you’re not careful (in other words, don’t link from a WordPress theme to your Cialis website).

But it works.

Other ideas include developing widgets that bloggers/webmasters can include on their sites – with a link back to you of course. Zillow offers widgets including mortgage calculators and other tools. Every one of them links back to the main Zillow website.

There are other strategies that work – the point is to start thinking about how you can build links without asking for them one at a time.

Nobody wants to link to you to help you rank better. That’s the wrong reason – there’s no motivation there. But if they’re sharing great content, pointing to a resource, spreading a joke or enhancing their own website the story changes.

The link should be an incidental part of that story, not the focus.

Meta-Linkbait: 33 Posts on Link Building That Built Loads of Links

Mike Tekula — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:30:43 +0000

I’ve been tinkering a lot with SEOmoz’s new Top Pages On Domain tool (currently in SEOmoz Labs – access for PRO users only). This tool returns a list of pages at the domain you input that have the highest number of in-linking domains (according to Linkscape) – a good indication of link power.

I noticed while reviewing the top pages some of my favorite blogs/websites that posts and articles on link building seemed to show up frequently. In other words, posts on link building and linkbait turn out to be pretty good linkbait themselves.

Not only do these posts contain awesome advice on building/attracting links, but each one is a linkbait case study in itself – a sort of Russian doll situation that makes my noggen hurt.

The criteria: I decided to include any page at several selected domains that has over 30 in-linking domains. This seemed a good cut-off point to keep the list manageable. I’m aware that some websites have an extraordinarily wide readership and thereby attract more links naturally.

The domains: Again, selected based on my opinion of the best content producers on the topic of link building

Click a domain to jump to that section

Copyblogger.com
SEOBook.com
SEOmoz.org
StuntDubl.com
Sugarrae.com
Wiep.net
PolePositionMarketing.com
AudetteMedia.com
CornwallSEO.com

I picked these websites/blogs because, in my opinion, the people behind them are the best at writing on link building in a way that attracts buzz (and links).

Note: the number in parentheses indicates in-linking domains according to SEOmoz Linkscape

Copyblogger.com

SEOBook.com

SEOmoz.org

StuntDubl.com

Sugarrae.com

Wiep.net

PolePositionMarketing.com

Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts (56)

AudetteMedia.com

The Fundamentals of Link Building (43)

CornwallSEO.com

Linkbait Articles (64)

How Linkscape™ Falls Short of Actionable Data

Mike Tekula — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:38:44 +0000

SEOmoz.org recently launched their flagship Linkscape^™ tool. If you haven’t heard, welcome back from underneath that rock. I hope the sunlight isn’t too blinding.

Rand Fishkin, founder and CEO, announced the tool at SMX East. I was there. I have the t-shirt to prove it (American Apparel – nice touch, Rand).

Since then I’ve been testing Linkscape, and I’ve come across a flaw that I find glaring.

Here’s a summary of the story behind the tool and how it works:
(click here if you know all this already)

Search engines, most notably Google, consider links to be a central signal of value or authority on the web (see Google PageRank), and they use links heavily to determine where a web page will rank
Search engines have a “link graph” of sorts, or a database of all the links they’ve indexed, where they point and their properties
SEOs to this point have had access to very limited data on this link graph – we only know what search engines deliberately make available
SEOmoz saw this as a need and saw a way to fulfill it – by building a crawler with the purpose indexing links, storing the information and providing an interface and metrics through which we can view it (for a price)

Here’s what the basic interface looks like once you’re inside an Advanced Report:

There is no doubt – Linkscape provides some incredible information and metrics that we simply have not had before. They’ve crawled some 30 billion pages on the web and will be looking to expand that number in the future. I’m recommending the tool to anybody who wants to know more about their own inbound link profile or that of their competitors.

But there is a plausible misconception some people can have about the data, and I want to point it out.

mozRank is one of the primary metrics used by Linkscape. SEOmoz developed mozRank as an alternative to Google’s PageRank – essentially, mozRank is a measurement of how much “link juice” a page has based on how many links point to it and where those links are published. It follows Google’s assessment of links as the “democratic quality” of the web – each link constituting a vote and an individual site’s “vote power” determined by how many votes point to it.

The trouble with PageRank is that Google has been less than transparent with how they calculate, factor-in and display PageRank. As a result, PageRank, once a focus of great attention, has widely been discounted as just a “little green bar” that provides little actionable data.

SEOmoz seems to put forth its own mozRank as a solid replacement for PageRank and a metric we can actually trust as the basis for educated action. But there’s a problem here, and it stems from how we define “actionable data” when it comes to search.

What makes search engine data actionable?

The main idea behind Linkscape is that SEOs and other web marketers will be able to leverage the data it provides to develop strategies and tactics and improve their search rankings. That’s a simplified take on it, but I think it fits. The question is: does mozRank give us that kind of data?

If we’re going to discuss “taking action” when it comes to SEO, we’ve got to talk about goals. Every action only makes sense through the lens of the goals that have been set. Goals differ from campaign to campaign, but primarily they all tie in to traffic – improving search engine traffic either in volume, quality or both. And if we’re going to talk about traffic, we have to talk about where, specifically, it’s going to come from. In SEO, Google is often the focus – with the lion’s share of the search market Google maintains this should be of no surprise.

So the question follows: how can we leverage mozRank to take the right actions with the goal improving our Google rankings/traffic?

The easy answer is to take mozRank at face value as a more pure and transparent link juice metric than PageRank and, when assessing a link profile, to trust this metric as an indication of how powerful a link from a given page is. The easy answer, however, is almost never the right answer.

Consider the following example from a Linkscape report I ran today. I ran it on an SEO agency (which will remain nameless) website that I saw to have some very competitive positioning in search results. I basically wanted to gain a little more insight into how they’d done it – and Linkscape is a great way to start looking.

By default, once you click over to either the “URL Anchor Text” or “Domain Anchor Text” tab and select an anchor text variation, Linkscape sorts the links by the percentage of mozRank each one passes to the URL/Domain the report was run on. The aim is to display the most important or valuable links for the URL/Domain – the links that are really making a difference in that site’s ability to rank in search engines.

When I was researching the site I mentioned today, I selected one of the most popular variations of anchor text used in their external links that was an exact match for a competitive keyword for which the site ranks at #2 in Google. My goal was to determine what web pages were helping this SEO agency rank so well for such a prominent keyword. The second most powerful link, according to mozRank passed, came from Alive Web Directory (www.alivedirectory.com):

I’ve run across Alive Web Directory before, and to my knowledge this site falls into the category of a “free-for-all” link directory with no significant editorial process – the kind of directory that we’ve all been warned about over the last few years, and the kind of website that Google penalized heavily about a year ago this time in their first serious step going after paid links.

My gut in this case would tell me that Google isn’t going to think much of a link from AliveDirectory.com. But Linkscape is telling me otherwise:

Linkscape has the Alive Web Directory domain with a mozRank (“mR”) of 7.27, the page containing the link with a 6.10 mR, and this link passing 11.28% of this SEO agency website’s 5.74 mR. This is the second most powerful link this website has according to Linkscape.

If I took this data as “actionable,” I might assume that getting a link to my own website from AliveDirectory.com would be a smart move. But I know Google has penalized a ton of free-for-all paid web directories like AliveDirectory.com in the past and that these directories have largely lost their ability to pass PageRank. My next question: what PageRank does AliveDirectory.com have?

They’ve got a nice round PageRank of 0.

This is a site has been up for more than two years and has more than 740,000 inbound links according to Yahoo! Site Explorer.

It should be obvious at this point that the Alive Web Directory was penalized heavily by Google. Indeed, they don’t even rank for their own brand name – a sure sign of a manual penalty on the part of Google’s webspam team.

So what good is mozRank?

This is just one link, I know. I’m hardly providing a wide sampling of these errors. But this is the 2nd most powerful link to an SEO agency website in terms of the percent of mozRank it passed, and it illustrates an important point.

Google’s link data is far more complex than Linkscape’s.

Just last year we witnessed how quickly Google can change the PageRank of a site and take away both its power to rank, even for its own brand/title, and power to pass PageRank to other websites. AliveDirectory.com is a perfect example of this. Every time Google manually penalizes a site this way, Google’s link graph has changed. With one free-for-all directory stripped of its ranking power, the PageRank of an entire network of sites is effected.

Since Linkscape currently does not seem to use Google’s PageRank or other metrics to determine whether a website has been penalized by Google, its entire link graph is thrown into question.

What if we remove the link from Alive Web Directory above from the link graph and mozRank distribution table as Linkscape has it? The entire picture that Linkscape offers as to what links are helping the website rank is altered – and because of a single, prominent link. There are undoubtedly more cases like this in this single link profile. And what about the other websites that Alive Web Directory is linking to? What percentage of mozRank is it passing to them while passing no PageRank in Google’s eyes?

I like Linkscape – there are a ton of great uses for it, and it is already a part of my SEO methodology. However, I’m not sold on mozRank as a reliable metric. If there is no observable correlation between mozRank and PageRank, if we can’t use mozRank to determine what links are truly helping a website rank well in Google or other search engines, is mozRank an actionable metric?

In the end, we’ve got to take what we can get. We’re not going to get our hands on Google’s link graph any time soon. Because there is always going to be a stretch between the assumptions we make in observing search engine ranking practices and what is actually the case, we’ve got to take every tool and metric with a grain of salt.

In the case of Linkscape, the take away here is to understand what mozRank really is: a metric based on the same theory as PageRank but certainly not a representation of PageRank itself.

It’s important to consider what makes data like this actionable or not. Obviously in cases like that of Alive Web Directory, mozRank doesn’t correlate very well to PageRank and Google’s view of what links matter on the web. So we’ve got to ask – what can mozRank actually tell us about the real world of search?